The United States is working at improving their global ranking in education.  We are behind many other countries when it comes to education, and we want to become more equal to them.  Common Core could help us get closer to this and make it a reality.  The Common Core State Standards are informed by other top-performing countries to prepare all students for success in our global economy and society.  The United States wants our education system to be more unified, and the Common Core State Standards could help us unify education throughout the states.  The Standards have been adopted by almost all states in The United States.  The Common Core State Standards will change the education of our future.  The Common Core State Standards provide a clear set of standards that every child should know and when they should know it.  "The Common Core, adopted by most states, does not constitute a federal curriculum or mandate specific readings.  But it does spell out skills that children should learn by different grade levels and general education principles" (Carr).  Common Core State Standards are new education standards that were made to be more rigorous and to help prepare students better for college and careers.  Common Core is more rigorous than the students are used to, so it may take some time for them to adapt.  In an article written by Kelly Petty that states how parents feel about Common Core states, "Common Core State Standards were intended to focus on providing what supporters say is rigorous and in-depth coursework in language arts and mathematics so students leave school with a deeper understanding of the concepts and prepared for college and the workforce." (Petty)  The Common Core State Standards clearly lay out where students should be in English and Mathematics.  The Standards are research and evidence based.  They are also clear, understandable, and consistent.  Common Core State Standards are also made to erase the gap between the education levels of each state.  The Common Core Standards were first introduced to have a set standard for the education of all students living in the United States.  "In 1893, 10 men met in a secret session at Columbia University in New York City until midnight, debating what American high schools should teach. In the final report, the Committee of Ten concluded that students deserved a strong liberal arts education -- in which 'every subject [is] taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be.'" (Ripley)  As years passed, depending on where you live determined the education you received.  A child's education highly depends on where they live.  A child can move from one school to another and they could be behind.  A child can be in the top of their class in one school and then be way behind in another school.  Common Core State Standards would help solve this problem.  Every school will be on the same track and it will tremendously help students who have to move in the middle of the school year.  This is one of the good things that will come from Common Core.  There are many great proponents to Common Core, but there are some areas where it could use some work.  While implementing the Common Core State Standards into schools, they should look at creativity and student success.

Teachers come up with creative activities to do in the class every day.  Common Core State Standards may take some of this away.   The standards are more rigorous which will mean teachers will have to take more time for explaining.  When so much time is spent on teaching the information, it takes away the time that they would be playing or doing an activity.  In the scholarly book "Play at the Center of the Curriculum", they go in depth why play is important.  The authors state, "Until this equilibrium is achieved, the child's intellectual activity is always bound within the larger domain of play because, not being able to form an objective, reliable, and suitable view of the world, there is always a subordination of the world to the child's immediate view.  In a sense, because children make of the world what they wish, we say that children are bound by play, where work and practice are tied to pretense, fantasy, and imitation".  (Alward)  Children learn by playing.  The authors also state, "Play is the heart of developmentally appropriate early childhood programs and, therefore, should be at the center of every curriculum." (Alward)  Play is a child's job and this is how they learn best.  Children have more creativity than adults and can come up with much more.  We do not want them to lose this by taking creativity out of the classroom.  If we take out creativity during the school day, then when will they have the chance to be creative?  Children today are busy and always have something going on.  Once they are out of school and go to whatever after school activities they have that day, they are too tired to do anything else.  Therefore, they will lose their creativity.

When children are in centers, it is almost like play to them.  They have a job to do while they are in their center, but they are having fun.  Children will remember the information that was presented in a way that is enjoyable to them more than if they are given information in a way that is not interesting to them.  They are most likely going to remember the things they enjoy instead of what the teacher had up on the board.  I have observed children working in centers in a few classrooms.  I have seen that the material that they review in their centers is remembered by the students and sticks with them more than the other information.  Play is important to a child's development.  There have been many renovations to the Bettendorf Public Library.  They added some play opportunities for children.  "Studies show that there is a direct correlation between play and early literacy skill.  Play encourages healthy brain development while encouraging exploration skills, language skills, social skills, physical skills and creativity.  Children learn more if they have opportunities for creative free play."(O'Dell)  Play is an important part of the learning process and gives them a chance to express themselves.  Common Core will take away time from play and the children will suffer from it.  The teachers will be more focused on them passing the test, therefore they will spend more time trying to cover everything instead of making sure they understand the concepts, but teachers need to be less focused on the standardized test and more focused on how much and the quality of the information the children are learning.  
Many people think that the loss in creativity will not affect the students.  Some think that classrooms will still have the same amount of creativity even with the rigorous standards, which is not possible.  People who think that creativity is not important in early childhood classrooms has not been exposed to seeing children as they play and connect the information to reality.  Elementary School should be designed to be a creative atmosphere.  This is how children express themselves, and it exposes a teacher to understand each individual student.  "We have to remember play is the way young people learn." (O'Dell)  This is also how teachers get to know their students, therefore they can teach them better because they know their strengths.  When a teacher knows all of their students they can meet the students' needs better.  Activities which involve creativity can help children understand a harder concept.  People expect children to understand everything and think that they can sit there all day and listen to many lessons.  They think that children have an attention span like we do and it is proven that they do not.  These people believe the Common Core Standards will improve our schools.

Teachers are also not having their students do as much creative writing anymore.  In New Orleans at Belle Chasse Elementary they used to write about their personal experiences.  They would write about their ideal vacation and about what they want to do over spring break. (Carr)  This is not happening as much now because of Common Core.  Common Core State Standards will soon be taking this out of many elementary schools.     At Belle Chasse Primary School the students "More rarely writes stories or essays based solely on his experience or imaginative musings anymore. Instead, it's all about citing 'textual evidence'. (Carr)  This is a very different approach from what these students are used to.  Students will be asked to write about information that they will be expected to interpret.  They will be given prompts like who is the main character and what is their characteristics, what is the theme of the story, and what was the problem and how was it solved.  This will be helpful for the students to learn at an early age and to practice, but it should not be the main focus at this age.  They need to be able to create stories and write about what they want to write about also, or they will lose their creativity.  Students need to be able to write about topics that interest them also or it will take away any desire for them to write in the future.

The lack of creativity will affect student success.  Children learn the best when they can associate it with something.  Children learn how to say their ABC's by singing a song, how to tie their shoes with a rhyme, and practice cooking and cleaning through play.  If children learn these things so well through creativity then why not continue teaching them that way.  We see that this is working so why change.  We need to add more creative activities to the classroom not take them away.  It is like proving that you have found a cure for cancer, and then not giving it to people with cancer.  The first years of a child's life are spent playing.  They learn a lot during this time.  It is proven that children need to play and that they learn through play so that is what they need to do.

When people envision a classroom they think about each student sitting in a desk with the students in rows all facing the white board where they envision the teacher.  This is not how it needs to be though.  The classroom should not be a quiet place where students sit there and do worksheets, even though that would be the easy thing to do.  The students should be sitting in groups and interacting with each other.  The University of Carnegie Mellon did research on group work in a classroom and they found, "Group projects can help students develop a host of skills that are increasingly important in the professional world.  Positive group experiences, moreover, have been shown to contribute to student learning, retention and overall college success." (Benefits of group)  More often than not students will end up with a job where they must work with other people.  They need to do group work to help prepare them and for them to gain the social skills necessary to work in a group.  Students can also figure out more complex problems when they are working in a group.  When a child is faced with a harder problem and asked to complete it alone, it can be overwhelming.  They will decide they cannot do it and give up.  When they are working with their classmates they can all collaborate and figure it out together.  It is a learning experience for them and the way a classmate explains something can help them understand a concept they did not understand.  At times a child might be able to explain it to another child better than the teacher.  Group work can be a good tool to use in a classroom as long as it is done correctly.  Group work can help a student succeed in a classroom.

Student success is one of the main focuses in education.  Student success is one of the major goals of Common Core, but it will not show the whole picture.  They are putting too much of an emphasis on the standardized test.  Classrooms are being taught according to the test.  According to David Green "To try to live up to the new demands and ensure better test scores, states, districts and schools have purchased resources, materials and scripted curricular modules solely developed for test success.  Being lost is the practical wisdom and planned spontaneity necessary to work with 20 to 35 individuals in a classroom.  Academic creativity has been drained from degraded and overworked experienced teachers.  Uniformity has sucked the life out of teaching and learning." (Green)  Classrooms are all beginning to look alike which is not a good thing.  It means that they are losing their creativity.  The students are not given enough time to fully grasp the concept and are rushed through the content.  This will affect their education.  Teachers feel like they must cover every subject, hence they do not go as in depth as they should.  Teachers are going through the topics on the surface and not giving their students the chance to dig and see what is below the surface.  This is not the way we should run a classroom.  Teachers need to focus more on teaching in a way that students will enjoy, then the better scores will come along with it.  Schools have been required to give standardized test sense 2002 when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed.  Every State was required to come up with their own benchmarks in language arts and mathematics under this act and they were widely varied.  (Lahey)  Now under the Common Core State Standards they have to get new tests that match up with the new standards.  According to New York Times, "New York was one of the first states to match up standardized tests with the Common Core State Standards, and last week's testing was the second year students sat for Common Core-aligned tests.  Scores fell last year, as might be expected because of the greater rigor inherent in those exams, which caused a lot of anxiety among educators." (Lahey)  There is a lot of emphasis put on this test throughout the year, and it can be stressful for the students.  The students also do not see why these test are important since they are not calculated into their class grade.  They do not see them as important, and this can affect the teachers.  Teachers get evaluated on how well their students do on the standardized test, so if their students do not take it seriously the teacher's reputation is at risk.  In some states promotions and teacher salary reflect the test scores, which are supposed to show student success, then the student's success is supposed to reflect how well the teachers are doing their job.  "Of course, not all tests are bad, and we want to ensure that students are learning valuable content.  But if schools focus all their efforts on preparing students for tests, they will not be successful in preparing students for life." (Starko)

Parents are worried that Common Core State Standards will affect their children's success in school.  Parents are and always will be highly invested in their child's education.  Parents want their children to do good and come home with good grades.   They see this change as a danger to that.  Common Core is a more rigorous set of standards that the children are not used to, so it will affect their grades.  The students will have to put in a little more effort in the Common Core State Standards, because if they do not then their grades will reflect it.  Parents see what is going on right now, which according to Petty is "Common Core in South Carolina hasn't gotten much fanfare from parents frustrated over their children's academic performance and worried they are seeing a complete federal takeover of education that standardizes learning and limits creativity." (Petty)  Many parents are so focused on the fact that almost all of the states are adopting these new standards and how it does lack creativity to see that if it is revised minimally then it could ultimately help their children.

Overall Common Core State Standards are a good idea.  They help alleviate the gap between required education standards in the different states.  Common Core State Standards help keep a strong focus on what they need to be covering in class.  They do need some work though.  They really need to revise a couple things to put a bigger emphasis on creativity and student success.  There are many ways that they could incorporate these small changes.  Common Core Standards just need to add some time for play, and that would help them seem more appealing.  "New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the term 'Carlson's law' to describe Dr. Curtis Carlson's take on autocracy in the workplace: 'Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.  Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb." (Green)  There needs to be more interactions between the students in the classroom and not just the teacher at the front of the class.  Children can learn a lot from each other if we give them the chance to.  Children are open-minded and see things differently than we do.  A concept that is simple to us can be hard for them to wrap their mind around.  If we allow them to have more time to work on activities then these harder concepts can be understood by them.  Common Core just needs to allow more time for this and not focus so much on the standardized test.   This will help fix many of the problems that we now have in our education system.  I think that Common Core is a good idea and I like that there are just a few things about it that I see could be made better.  I know that it will never be perfect, but I believe that Common Core will improve many of the problems that I have seen.  "Top down innovation is what Common Core and other efforts to homogenize education are bringing to us.  So the only real question left is: Why have President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Bill Gates and Achieve Inc. chosen to be orderly but dumb, especially when the opportunity cost is children?" (Green)  We just have to think about which problems we are more concerned about and about what is better for the children because that is what it is all about anyways.
